Claws For Concern

Jack had them organized in chronological order, and his sources ranged from the Tullahoma paper to those of other towns and cities, including Jackson and Memphis. The early headlines were lurid, especially one from the Tullahoma paper: Barber Family Butchered in Their Sleep. I snorted as I read it. I wasn’t sure how anyone could be butchered with a shotgun, but I reckoned the editor had wanted to grab everyone’s attention and sell more papers. Despite the headline, however, the article itself was not sensational in tone.

After reading the early accounts of the crime, I had a fairly clear picture of the opening stages of the investigation. Elizabeth Barber had come home around nine in the morning after spending the night with an unnamed friend, who turned out to be Leann Finch. She discovered the bodies and started screaming the place down. One of the hired men heard her and came running. He got her out of the house and called the sheriff’s department to report the discovery. He then took Elizabeth back to the Finch home, where Leann’s mother ministered to the girl.

Suspicion quickly focused on Bill Delaney, who was known to be a heavy drinker with a sometimes violent temper. One of the other hired men, a man named Sonny Willis, had overheard a loud argument between Delaney and Hiram Barber two days before the murders. During the altercation, according to Willis, Delaney threatened Barber’s life if Barber didn’t pay Delaney his back wages.

The investigation limped along after Sylvia Delaney gave her son an alibi for the night of the murders. She could not be shaken, and the sheriff’s department reluctantly (my interpretation) had to start looking for other suspects. The fact that the murder weapon belonged to Hiram Barber but had disappeared wasn’t mentioned until several weeks after the first account in the Tullahoma paper. The sheriff’s department, assisted by volunteers, did an extensive search in the area around the Barber farm but without result. The murderer had apparently taken great pains to make sure the weapon would never be found. If it had turned up at some point in the past twenty years, Jack hadn’t mentioned it.

Reporters had talked to residents in the community where the Barber farm was located. No one had any information to offer on potential suspects but several allowed as how Hiram Barber was extremely difficult to deal with and not highly regarded in the community. The locals liked his wife, however, and generally felt sorry for her and the children. One person, a Mrs. Mitzi Gillon, told the reporter from the Jackson paper that poor Mrs. Barber was always embarrassed about how worn and out-of-style her clothes were. Barber begrudged his family any money spent on fancy things, with the exception of his teenage daughter. Elizabeth, Mrs. Gillon concluded, got most anything she wanted as long as it wasn’t too extravagant, while her mother and brothers had to make do with very little. “They didn’t even have a TV,” Mrs. Gillon said at the end of the interview.

Hiram Barber sounded like a thoroughly unpleasant man, a skinflint of the worst kind. The other farmers in the area who spoke with reporters said Barber’s farm was prosperous enough that the family didn’t need to go without. Barber simply hated to let loose of money.

Such a sad story, I thought. A miserable man who deprived his family—except for the daughter—of ordinary things like decent clothing and a television set. It sounded to me like Hiram Barber was stuck in the 1930s, the Depression era. I wondered if his parents had been like that. He must have learned that behavior somewhere.

His daughter had done well for herself, despite the loss of her family. She had sold the farmland and ended up marrying a man who became a prominent businessman in Tullahoma. She had children of her own and no doubt a nice house with as many amenities and luxuries as they could afford. A far cry from her early life, certainly.

Eventually the press revealed the name of Elizabeth’s friend. Leann Finch and her family provided Elizabeth Barber’s alibi, though it didn’t seem to me that the sheriff’s department had seriously considered her a suspect. According to Leann, the two girls were up most of the night, talking in her bedroom. Leann was home for the weekend from her first semester of college, and the girls hadn’t seen each other in several weeks. Elizabeth wanted to know all about college life, and college men in particular.

The case languished due to the lack of new leads or viable suspects, and the press coverage dwindled away. Jack had found a few articles across the intervening years, all of which mentioned the main facts of the case but offered no fresh insights as to who might have been behind the killings. It seemed like an impossible case to solve, and I had momentary doubts about my involvement in the whole thing.